Far be it from me to tell a company how to protect its brand. If Yahoo! wants to let its writers spell the company’s name without an exclamation mark, it’s OK with me. And if it wants to overlook a typo on Yahoo! Music (which any spell-checker would have found), then it’s okie-dokie, too:

Good grief! What kind of education did the Yahoo! Shine writer get? Did it include anything about English grammar and punctuation? Anything? Maybe she was out the day her third-grade teacher told the class not to use both an exclamation mark and a period at the end of a sentence.

Did the teacher also say something about making sure your sentences weren’t sense-free? It was probably unnecessary — except for one little girl who missed the whole point.

But I quibble. So far, Yahoo! Shine is getting raves from unexpected critics. OK, I made that up. In fact, I have no idea what that would mean. I was just parroting what the writer told me:

How difficult can it be to spell the name of the company you work for? Pretty difficult if the company name includes a punctuation mark. At least that’s the conclusion you might come to if you read the Yahoo! front page.

I thought that the Silicon Valley Internet titan was called Yahoo! — with an exclamation mark:

Imagine the confusion among the company’s writers, editors, and proofreaders. (Oh, yeah, we have no evidence that they have actual writing, editing, and proofreading professionals. So let’s just call them “staffers.”) So if staffers don’t know the name of the company they work for, can you blame them if they’re befuddled when they have to form the possessive of Yahoo! or Yahoo or whatever it is?

It almost makes me feel sorry for them. Can’t someone please tell those staffers how to spell the company’s name? Please.

There’s some writing that piques my interest, but not in a good way. Like, I was curious when Yahoo! dropped the ! from its name. Or how did the writer for Yahoo! Shine get away with dropping the iconic punctuation mark from her employer’s names?

More interest-provoking writing includes an explosion of quotation marks, none of which makes sense, followed by a split-up online, an apostrophe indicating there’s only one toy expert in the world, and arbitrarily capitalized toys for under. Interesting!

Fascinating that a professional writer has no idea that Nook, iPad, and iPhone are trademarks, and not common nouns:

And so is Crock-Pot. And what’s he doing with my bread? And is that his team’s logo?

How did this slip by the editor? Someone’s apostrophe is missing:

The writer has definitely piqued my curiosity. How did she get this job and how does she keep it?

Nothing makes a company look more careless, more indifferent to protecting its brands, and more — dare I say it? — dumb than an inability to spell its products or services consistently. Such is the case of Yahoo! and its omg!.

The writers at Yahoo! can’t seem to agree on how to spell the celebrity-gossip site. Is it all capital letters, without any punctuation?

Uh, no. It’s all capital letters, with an exclamation mark:

Except when it’s all lowercase letters without the big bang:

Or when it’s lowercase with that exclamation point:

Confused, I searched for the definitive word on the site’s spelling. And finally I have it from a real authority — the Yahoo! corporate blog, “Yodel Anecdotal.” It’s all caps, with an exclamation mark.

I get it. You’re busy. You have a deadline breathing down your neck. You don’t have time to proofread what you wrote. Your employer doesn’t think editors are necessary. So there are lots of rationalizations to explain the misspelling of Zoe Saldana on Yahoo! TV‘s “Daytime in No Time”:

And there may be an explanation for the apparent missing word (or words) here:

But, I was shuddering when I read shuddering instead of stuttering. It’s like saying, “Oh, I don’t care about what I write”:

And “I don’t care where the punctuation goes. If I want to include an exclamation mark in the title ‘Toddlers & Tiaras,’ I will.”

“If I want to hyphenate a word, I will”:

There are lots of excuses for writing like this. But I’m still shuddering.

Did Internet giant Yahoo! drop its iconic exclamation point from its name? According to the Yahoo! corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal, it looks like the company is going for a more streamlined corporate moniker:

Or perhaps someone is just a bit lax when it comes to protecting the company brand. Frankly, I don’t care if Yahoo! (or is it now Yahoo?) wants to spell its name as G-O-O-G-L-E.